Evernote for things that I may need to come back to later in the future or remember (documentation, guides, workarounds, lists, etc), Pocket for articles that I'd like to read sometime but that I never actually read.
I think Google gave it a pretty good shot at competing with WhatsApp with Allo. The problem is that at the end of the day, the network effect is what matters with messaging. No matter how good the product, it doesn't matter if everyone I know doesn't use it as well. It's not an engineering question, it's a social one; a lot has to change to get people to switch from iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger today.
The theory says that you can get people to switch if you deliver a product that is x10 better than the competition, but really, how can you possibly improve messaging as it is today? It's not like people are going to go "Wow, this app sends my messages so much better than <current established app>, I'll go ahead and switch and tell everyone I know".
Spam and scraping are not the problem, real people are. Getting a nutjob show up with a gun at your office because you are required by law to make your contact and address details public ain't fun, and not something that you can solve with ROT13 in Javascript.
I keep using Thunderbird because I haven't found anything better, but it's unbearably slow. I'd gladly jump ship to a better cross platform, featureful, responsive email client, but apparently they don't make these anymore.
Well you certainly get a lot more press for dissing Facebook right now than back then. It's the scapegoat of the moment, may as well take advantage and get on board if it suits you.
Does no one realize that this a bed that we have made ourselves? That the sea of data that the large five swim in is product of the modern deal that society has with tech, which no one forced us to make? Why is everyone happy to blame Facebook for what is fundamentally modern society's fault? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The thing is, no one is arguing that propietary and closed is better than public and open. The problem comes when propietary and closed become the "better" option to the masses (faster, easier to use, more user friendly, more available, etc); at that point, you can protest, but average users don't like to give up convenience for ideology, hence on the long run the only way to beat closed and propietary is to have something public and open that can compete.
Mistakes happen, people are human. I don't know that is fair to judge everything Oculus and Facebook are doing based on a couple of incidents; every company, good or bad, large or small, is bound to suffer from minor mishaps occasionally.
Europe is too concerned wrestling with large US tech companies to understand that more regulations will only exacerbate the very thing they are trying to get away from.
Somewhat tangential, but, is live coding with multiple people working on the same editor a thing? I feel like something like this would be incredibly distracting to get any actual work done, but I guess there must be legitimate use cases for this.
I get why phrased like that it can sound condescending, but really, "what do I use this for" can be a perfectly legitimate and innocent question. Personally, if I ask this, most of the time it's because I'm genuinely intrigued and would like to understand it better, not to put the author down.
You just have to look at what happened after the MtGox collapse in 2014: Bitcoin goes back to sleep for 2 or 3 years, afterwards everyone forgets it ever happened and another rally takes place where cryptocurrencies "go mainstream". Lather, rinse and repeat until the amount of people willing to speculate on it is completely exhausted.
It exists in its early stages, but it's terribly impractical, hence no exchange or end user is in a rush to adopt it. Its design is almost like someone took a hard look at Bitcoin and concluded "Gee, this is not cumbersome enough for people, we need to make transacting a worse and more confusing experience".
Does Facebook really need to take on this role of news publisher? I get that people are accustomed to it now, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to undo this, let Facebook be the place where you go for the occasional family photos and local event updates, and let news be somewhere else? We don't need Facebook to be a newspaper at all, people were doing fine before it.
This is very impressive if what it says is true. They've basically reinvented the concept of a digital computer display by projecting a sort of artificial light field into the eye. The amount of capital they've raised makes sense now, this sounds like a ridiculously big undertaking. What remains to be seen is whether all this work will be worth it as opposed to just better displays, but color me intrigued.
> The dual mobile/console functionality of the Switch seems to be almost as gimmicky as the motion controls of the Wii.
As someone that was extremely skeptical of the Switch but ended up grabbing one anyway: it's not as gimmicky as it seems. The truth is that while the Switch is being advertised as a hybrid, the real strength of this console, to me, is that it's super agile to use, while still being a console in the traditional sense. Like a smartphone or a modern laptop, you can wake it with the press of a button, play for a while, then put it to sleep with the press of a button again, then resume playing instantly later. That's less about the gimmick and more about what a modern videogame console ought to be today, but it's not immediately evident to the naked eye until you start playing with it regularly.
I personally find that I play more often with my Switch than with previous videogames consoles I've owned, simply because of that agility, because I can fit it in my life without making time for hours long sessions.
> for some reason, the structure of the network means that the estimated output learns realistic features first, and then overfits to the noise afterwords.
Why does this happen? What characteristics does the network structure have that cause this effect?
As an European, reading things like these never ceases to amuse me, both the salaries that engineers earn and the crazy high cost of living to go with it. In Germany $120k is the salary of your average successful internet startup CEO and generally speaking an outrageous amount of money, in the Bay Area is about enough to get by, pay rent and save. The disconnect is astounding. And it's not like the quality of life in the Bay Area is ten times greater than in the top cities of Europe either, not to my knowledge anyway.
Gold has value beyond store of value, but not nearly as much as you would think. A lot of what makes gold valuable is people's faith on it, and in that sense it's not significantly better than bitcoin. That's not to say that bitcoin prices are reasonable, but just that there's an irrational component in almost everything.
> If you are poor, getting into business is always hard.
On the other hand, there's internet, and self-publishing creative work has never been easier. Business is hard, getting noticed is harder, but all things considered it's never been so accessible.
The problem is that a lot of people can't help themselves from falling prey to the attention seeking media. I don't know whether this is something that should be regulated, but there is some responsibility on the party that's exploiting people's time fully knowing what they are doing, not just on the addicted consumer.
Let's be honest though, this grid-like interface is going to be used mostly for the NSFW subreddits, where the title and the comments aren't really that important.
I don't think this gives you enough information to judge, to be honest. If your gut is telling you this is a red flag, then you should probably heed that feeling, but what you describe is not necessarily a red flag, there are pros and cons. A team of "best friends" may be preferable to a team of cutthroat assholes for example.
Reverse engineering. Basically, if you want to take a compiled binary apart to figure out how it works, IDA is the best tool that there is for that job.